AndyRobertsPhotos
Male Sparrowhawk With Kill
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I posted to flickr.com
Male Sparrowhawk With Kill
http://www.flickr.com/photos/aroberts/6400157743/
November 25 2011, 9:59am | Comments »
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I posted to flickr.com
Male Sparrowhawk With Kill
http://www.flickr.com/photos/aroberts/6400153129/
AndyRobertsPhotos
Male Sparrowhawk With Kill
November 25 2011, 9:58am | Comments »
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I posted to flickr.com
Male Sparrowhawk With Kill
http://www.flickr.com/photos/aroberts/6400147537/
AndyRobertsPhotos
Male Sparrowhawk With Kill
Male Sparrowhawk With Kill
November 25 2011, 9:56am | Comments »
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I posted to flickr.com
Male Sparrowhawk With Kill
http://www.flickr.com/photos/aroberts/6400142317/
AndyRobertsPhotos
Male Sparrowhawk With Kill
Male Sparrowhawk With Kill
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November 25 2011, 9:55am | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
Blue House Farm North Fambridge
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/11/25/blue-house-farm-north-fambridge
Blue House Farm Bird Reserve, North Fambridge Thursday is our new day off, so we took ourselves out of London on the Eastern Railway line towards Southend and then on the little single track branch line from Wickham to North Fambridge1 .
North Fambridge is a lovely quiet place with big skies, salt marsh estuary, boatyards, a good old pub and loads of wildlife. The flooded fields, dykes and river provide such special habitats for all kinds of birds that the main farm in the area, Blue House Farm, is now managed as an SSSI2 nature reserve by the Essex Wildlife Trust. The large flocks of thousands of geese still haven’t arrived from Siberia and Eastern Europe yet, the weather over there isn’t quite cold enough all along the path but Brent geese were chomping away on the sward and flying alongside the sea wall in several flocks of fifty or more, which is a cheery sight on a mild and bright, relatively wind free morning towards the end of November. Other types of geese included Greylags and Canadas, about 25 Barnacle geese, and a small group of six White Fronted geese. Will Marsh Harrier take a Wigeon? Back home at Wanstead Flats we are always pleased to catch a rare glimpse of a pair of Teal on the Alexandra Lake, but from the furthermost hide at Blue House Farm we watched a group of about 150 teal being frightened up into the air by a pair of Marsh Harriers hunting along the reed beds. These colourful small ducks can fly really well, twisting and turning almost like a murmuration of starlings. Then one of the Marsh Harriers started to make a move towards a solitary wigeon we’d been watching sitting on the river. The Marsh Harrier approached like an Osprey towards a fish near the surface, talons outstretched to within a couple of feet above the hapless wigeon, who wasn’t in the least bit bothered by the very real threat of impending carvery, the Harrier hovered for a second, eyeing up the prospect, then seemed to think better of it and withdrew. The wigeon still didn’t move towards cover though, and the Harrier came back for a second approach, but again decided that it dan’t want to attack a whole duck right at the moment and headed off back to the reed beds where it was presumably hunting for small songbirds or mammals.
Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blogBlue House Farm North Fambridge The Crouch Valley LineSite of Special Scientific Interest
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- wildlife
- bird
- wanstead
- birds
- wanstead flats
- sea wall
- habit
- Alexandra Lake
- bird reserve
- brent geese
- crouch valley
- Marsh Harriers
- reed beds
- salt marsh
- white fronted geese
- widgeon
- wildlife trust
November 25 2011, 3:14am | Comments »
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I posted to youtube.com
Living Here - Andy Roberts at Havering Folk Club
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fY0FcoqmEJI&feature=youtube_gdata
November 24 2011, 1:23pm | Comments »
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I posted to youtube.com
Dead Skunk - Andy Roberts Finale at Haverfolk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eaEvtOzycdE&feature=youtube_gdata
November 24 2011, 1:11pm | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
Biarritz old port Eurostar deals to Biarritz http…
http://distributedresearch.net/status/biarritz-old-port-eurostar-deals-to-biarritz-http/
Biarritz old port Eurostar deals to Biarritz http://www.flickr.com/photos/aroberts/2323979784/
November 24 2011, 12:07pm | Comments »
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I posted to wordr.org
Pinpointing Mozart’s new plaque via London maps and patterns
Until the early part of the nineteenth century the area to the right of London’s Charing Cross Road – then in its previous incarnation as Castle Street – stretching across St Martin’s Lane over to Bedford Street in the heart of Covent Garden, was a much finer gauze of alleys and passageways than the present day street grid. Cecil Court is one of a handful of thoroughfares surviving from that period, and this year became the setting for a new plaque to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
Last week I went there to meet the man behind the campaign to get the plaque, Tim Bryars, who runs an antiquarian map and topographical print emporium. Inside his compact premises surrounded by stunning old maps and prints Tim told me over a coffee how the plaque came to be put up by Cecil Court Traders Association and unveiled by Simon Callow in September 2011, after attempts to get Westminster Council to support the project failed. Perhaps if they hadn’t done it themselves the celebrations that ensued mightn’t have been on such an operatic scale (see this video for more details). In turn Tim shed light on the fascinating history of Georgian Cecil Court and the story of the 8-year-old Mozart’s three and a half month stay there as a lodger over John Couzin’s barber shop; a time when the young composer was already coming to the peak of his fame as a performer. Listen to the interview to get the lowdown…
Two things from our conversation really struck me – one covered in the interview and one in our long chat afterwards. The first was the effort he went to trace the exact whereabouts of the building Mozart had stayed in. The street was demolished and rebuilt in the late 1880s and early 1890s, and in the 1760s house numbers were not widely in use. The presence on a small street of a barber shop – perhaps with a barber’s pole outside – would suffice to denote the building’s whereabouts in most if not all despatches from that era. Tim had to sift through a disparate series of old maps, documents and many rolls of microfiche of the parish rate books in the British Library and elsewhere before working out from the accumulated references to people and places a discernable pattern that finally pinpointed where the former building housing John Couzin’s barbers would be on the newer street layout (see the series of old London maps covering the vicinity). So the plaque is also tribute to an assiduous act of discovery and some serious pattern recognition was at play in the required detective work.
The other indelible remark Tim made was that he doesn’t want Cecil Court to become a museum piece. In other periods gone by it’s been a hotbed of radical reformism as the key meeting place of the London Corresponding Society, and was at the start of the last century the hub of innovation in the emerging Brtitish film industry (more on that in a future post). Yet despite the pedestrian walkway’s undeniable historical importance and character, Bryars is more concerned it shouldn’t become a rarified island of architectural interest and retail diversity. It’s currently a high-density hotspot of specialist bookshops, whilst the bookstores and other independent businesses of the adjacent Charing Cross Rd have dwindled in recent years. A great thing about London is its always been a living patchwork of history and local particulars, he added. His remark didn’t stem, I felt, from a narrow zeal to preserve nor artisan special pleading but from an appreciation of commercial and civic openness, and the losses incurred (which we can’t recover) once that context is erased. – You can find Cecil Court on Twitter and Facebook. Tim Bryars is always updating the History of Cecil Court webpage – if you have any new information about the street, please contact him via the email address listed at the top of that webpage. Tim also writes a fantastic antiquarian maps blog Unto the Ends Of the Earth.
November 24 2011, 8:05am | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
Eurostar Deals to Strasbourg http www eurostardealsblog co…
http://distributedresearch.net/status/eurostar-deals-to-strasbourg-http-www-eurostardealsblog-co/
Eurostar Deals to Strasbourg http://www.eurostardealsblog.co.uk/eurostar-deals/eurostar-deals-to-strasbourg
November 22 2011, 1:59pm | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
Dirty Water Pumps http 12vwaterpump co uk dirty…
http://distributedresearch.net/status/dirty-water-pumps-http-12vwaterpump-co-uk-dirty/
Dirty Water Pumps http://12vwaterpump.co.uk/dirty-water-pump/dirty-water-pumps
November 22 2011, 1:58pm | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
St Andrew’s Day http distributedresearch net blog 2010…
http://distributedresearch.net/status/st-andrews-day-http-distributedresearch-net-blog-2010/
St Andrew’s Day http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2010/11/30/st-andrews-day-2
November 22 2011, 1:57pm | Comments »
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I posted to wordr.org
Finding Flann O’Brien: plaques, places, tongues and names
Three is a curious number and if he could speak to us now, I wonder what author Flann O’Brien would make of the three plaques in Ireland erected to commemorate him. He’d probably make a darkly memorable quip that appeared at first glance lighthearted. This after all is the writer who brought us (via one of his novels’ characters) the hellishly catchy poetics of “a pint of plain is your only man“. Or he might query the essence of the number itself, turn the glyph on its head and spin it madly. As a satirist and (some say) Ireland’s first postmodernist, his imagination was unbounded. Above is the plaque at his childhood home of 17 Bowling Green. In fact this plaque has been replaced in 2011 by this one but I’d love to know where it’s been retired to! Unpacking this plaque, we see he was born Brian Ó Nualláin (Brian O’Nolan) 100 years ago on the 5th October 1911 in Strabane, County Tyrone, now a county in Northern Ireland but at the time pre-partition when the whole island was ruled from Westminster. So his nationality is bound up with borders that shifted dramatically in his lifetime. His mother tongue was Irish, the young Brian speaking no English until he was seven. Hence the bilingual plaques, and the Irish-language novel An Béal Bocht (The Poor Mouth). But like his near contemporaries Joyce and Beckett he catapulted to the peaks of prose from these margins, doing amazing things with the English language. O’Nolan left Strabane to attend Blackrock College and then University College Dublin. After that he entered the Irish civil service and remained there for the rest of his working life, supporting a family of ten after his father’s early death. Not for him the forays round Europe and flânuer lifestyle. He was more likely to be found debating life and literature with other local wits in the many pubs of Dublin. But this was the context that fuelled his very particular vision. His first novel ‘At Swim Two Birds’ (finished in 1939 when he was 29) defies description but this summary of it’s premise gives a flavour of its workings… At Swim-Two-Birds presents itself as a first-person story by an unnamed Irish student of literature. The student believes that “one beginning and one ending for a book was a thing I did not agree with”, and he accordingly sets three apparently quite separate stories in motion. The first concerns the Pooka MacPhellimey, “a member of the devil class”. The second is about a young man named John Furriskey, who turns out to be a fictional character created by another of the student’s creations, Dermot Trellis, a cynical writer of Westerns. The third consists of the student’s adaptations of Irish legends, mostly concerning Fin Mac Cool and mad King Sweeney.” [Source: At Swim Two Birds - Wikipedia] Three stories within a story… there’s that number again. It might be classed as postmodernism but suffice to say the book is very readable and painfully funny. The same goes for his later novel (now slated to be filmed) The Third Policeman which has cast a long shadow over playful fiction. It was even featured momentarily in season two of Lost in 2005 and Lost scriptwriter and producer Craig Wright suggested it provides a context for Lost’s mythology. Next in our investigation of the plaques we come to the matter of his three names (four if you include the Irish spelling of his first), possibly confusing for the Open Plaques naming system (we currently list two of them). Brian O’Nolan, the civil servant. Flann O’Brien, the pseudonym of the literary author. And Myles na cGopaleen – his pen-name as the famous satirical ‘Cruiskeen Lawn’ columnist for The Irish Times newspaper, a column that brought him more notoriety in his lifetime than his books and made him unpopular with the grandees of the Irish state. The name itself is an odd asemblage, and Brian / Flann / Myles had some arch comments [source] on its interpretation: Capall is the Irish word for “horse” (from Vulgar latin caballus), and ‘een’ (spelled ín in Irish) is a diminutive suffix. The prefix na gCapaillín is the genitive plural in his Ulster Irish dialect (the Standard Irish would be “Myles na gCapaillíní”), so Myles na gCopaleen means “Myles of the Little Horses”. Capaillín is also the Irish word for “pony”, as in the name of Ireland’s most famous and ancient native horse breed, the Connemara pony. O’Nolan himself always insisted on the translation “Myles of the Ponies”, saying that he did not see why the principality of the pony should be subjugated to the imperialism of the horse. Finally, we arrive at the perennially thorny issue of what constitutes a plaque and whether we should include a bronze relief depicting O’Brien that has this year been inset into the pavement outside The Palace Bar in Dublin’s Fleet Street, a celebrated watering hole he frequented along with fellow writers Brendan Behan and Patrick Kavanagh. Is this a plaque, and by who’s reckoning? Are there even any words on it? We wait in readiness until someone verifies this state of affairs more precisely. Happy centenary Flann O’Brien, I’m sorry I couldn’t make it to the big celebrations. although I made it to the centenary of Bloomsday in 2004, which you helped organise the very first celebration of in 1954. I hope on your bi and tricentenary, you’ll still get people marvelling and talking. I’ve talked mostly about plaques, places, tongues and names here because I can’t do justice to this author’s scabrous columns and mindbending fiction; for that you can look elsewhere. He died on 1st April 1966 and while I’m not sure who the joke was on, the legend on his Dublin plaque states one thing at least that seems unambiguous – Ní bheith a leithéid arís ann (trans: His like will not be here again). – Image credits: photographs Creative Commons licensed courtesy of Strabanephotos on Flickr and Heatseeker who donated a photo to us.
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November 21 2011, 4:14pm | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
Brian’s Action Logging Story A http actionlogr co…
http://distributedresearch.net/status/brians-action-logging-story-a-http-actionlogr-co/
Brian’s Action Logging Story A http://actionlogr.co.uk/action-logging-stories-brian/
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November 21 2011, 1:43pm | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
More photos Banger Racing http distributedresearch net blog…
http://distributedresearch.net/status/more-photos-banger-racing-http-distributedresearch-net-blog/
More photos Banger Racing http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2009/04/24/figure-of-eight-banger-racing
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November 21 2011, 1:42pm | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
Andy Roberts music profile on Aboutme http about…
http://distributedresearch.net/status/andy-roberts-music-profile-on-aboutme-http-about/
Andy Roberts music profile on Aboutme http://about.me/andyrobertsmusic
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November 21 2011, 3:40am | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
Delete WordPress Plugins with ManageWP http distributedresearch net…
Delete WordPress Plugins with ManageWP http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/11/20/delete-wordpress-plugins-with-managewp
November 20 2011, 5:08pm | Comments »
